Jeff Bridges may finally get his Academy Award this year. The movie that's inspiring chatter about the Best Actor award (that has inexplicably eluded Bridges through four Oscar nominations) is Crazy Heart, a new, modestly budgeted indie by first-time director Scott Cooper, in which the actor, who plays a burned-out country-music star ripe for either salvation or damnation, sings his own numbers. "Jeff Bridges shines as a country-music has-been. Will the elusive Oscar finally be his?"

Unlike the zigzagging protagonist (George Clooney) of his latest film, Up in the Air, Jason Reitman tends to stay close to home. "If we were in a small town, you'd call me a 'townie.' I'd be the guy who's always lived within a mile of the house he grew up in," says the Oscar-nominated Juno director on a recent afternoon in his West Hollywood office, where a small sign beside the front door announces, modestly: "We Make Movies." Read "Grounded: Up in the Air director Jason Reitman has a good sense of where he's from and where he's headed."